Hanoi Loosens Central Economic Reins

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Vietnam has announced a sweeping domestic economic policy that in effect abandons centralized planning in favor of managerial decision-making at the factory level in state enterprises.

Vietnamese press and radio reports say the policy also introduces worker incentives, quality control, shareholding, an expanded banking industry and wage scales linked to productivity. It is to take effect Jan. 1.

While some of these concepts have been discussed and occasionally allowed to operate over the last few years, Vietnamese officials and diplomats say that the decision is the most comprehensive economic policy change since the unification of Vietnam in 1975.

''After nearly a decade of exploration of the realities, now a new structure of management has been formed,'' the Vietnamese Communist Party daily newspaper, Nhan Dan, said in an editorial Dec. 16. The policy pronouncement, read in installments on the Government's domestic radio service, has since been collated and translated for the British Broadcasting Corporation's monitoring service. No date was given for the decision. Leader's Grip Seems Tighter

The publication of an economic plan comprehensive enough to include everything from how to handle capital depreciation to the need for day-care centers in factories appears to indicate the strengthening of the hand of Vietnam's party leader, Nguyen Van Linh, who has been in office a year.

Mr. Linh, along with Vo Van Kiet, the Government's chief economic planner and others in the new hierarchy, have been advocating the ''renovation'' of Vietnam's economy through the use of unorthodox methods. But there have been few positive results because, diplomats suggest, the country is devoid of economic expertise and still subject to intervention, if not sabotage, by hard-line Marxists.

Earlier this month, when the party's Central Committee met, it heard gloomy reports of acute problems on economic, social and security fronts. Vietnam, cut off from Western assistance by its occupation of neighboring Cambodia and entirely reliant on the Soviet bloc for aid, is among the world's poorest nations.

Today, Mr. Kiet, who is also a Deputy Prime Minister, told the National Assembly that Vietnam was losing the battle to feed its growing population. He said the food available to each person had dropped by 8 percent since 1985, when low consumption levels of needed nutrients had already begun to cause widespread malnutrition.

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The changes in economic policy reflect similar rethinking in the Soviet Union, but Vietnamese officials are defensive when asked if Moscow had demanded an end to the inefficiencies and corruption that have ''squandered'' Soviet aid, by Hanoi's admission.

Vietnamese say the parallel policy changes are coincidental, and point to experiments in free-market economics in what was formerly South Vietnam in the early 1980's, shortly after its conquest by the North. Those experiments - really extensions of South Vietnam's traditional ways of doing business - were suppressed by hard-liners in Hanoi led by the party leader, Le Duan, and his successor, Truong Chinh. Mr. Linh was purged from the Politburo in 1982 for his support for ''southern'' methods.

Vietnamese see the move now toward decentralization, the end to subsidies and the beginning of cost accounting, bank financing and other free-market practices as the product of a confluence of thinking in Moscow and Hanoi. The Talents of the People

Vietnam, its officials say, still has major problems of underdevelopment to overcome. But Vietnamese officials and diplomats say they are aware of the inherent abilities of the people, demonstrated by their economic success as exiles.

The party daily Dan referred to the need to ''liberate all the potential'' and to ''create energy'' among the Vietnamese. The new economic code, for example, will allow Vietnamese workers to go to international trade fairs for ''market research.''

It will also allow workers to submit ideas for improved production and employers to hire and dismiss workers free of political pressures.

A version of this article appears in print on December 29, 1987, on Page A00004 of the National edition with the headline: Hanoi Loosens Central Economic Reins. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe